Control Discovery

Proven Solutions for Enterprise Compliance

Tailoring a Solution to Identify Privileged Emails

The client, an AMLAW 100 law firm, decided to conduct a native review of 200 GB of email data for several dozen custodians.

In this particular matter, although the client viewed email to be of secondary importance, the ability to review this information quickly and at a reasonable cost was viewed as important.

Control Discovery worked with the client to develop a search term list of some 120 stemmed phrases.

In addition, we used specialized email search technology to identify privileged email where there were dozens of subtle variations in the email addresses used by each custodian.

These variations were due to a combination of factors including business unit reorganizations and marriages.

In all, Control Discovery identified 1,400 different email address variations for the targeted employees, law department staff, and outside counsel.

Based on the search results of stemmed-word lists and email address variations, email messages were split into separate potentially responsive and potentially privileged outputs for each custodian.

The client then reviewed the resulting responsive and privileged email archives for each custodian.

Next, Control Discovery worked with the client to make final adjustments to each archive. The client completed the native review in a matter of days.

During native review, we discovered two issues that needed further attention.

First, we found additional variations on search terms that were not originally considered by the litigation team.

In addition, one former outside counsel to a party had changed firms during his term of service and failed to disclose that fact to our client.

The native review caught the additional privileged emails not isolated with the original filters.